You Are What You Link

Maybe It Is Good To Fast

Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.

I broke one of my own rules in last week’s newsletter. I am not sure if anyone has ever noticed, but not since July 22nd, 2019 did I include a hyperlink in the introduction. Quite a big difference compared to the first versions of this newsletter.

Back in the early days, I’d often just dump endless links on you. In those days I remember talking with friends who said that while they enjoyed reading the newsletter, they found the titles of the links a little too abstract to gain any meaning. Somehow it dawned on me that I had been too submerged in my own universe, neglecting to add words to my thoughts.

Since then I’ve been working on unfolding my own thoughts. Consistently fighting the instinct to skip an explanation by linking to an external site. Maybe it is a personality trait, maybe it is the years of academic writing ingrained in me that urges me to add links to everything.

What I realized when I started to add context to every single link I added to the newsletter was how hard it was for me to write without copy-pasting. Instead of just adding context to essential quotes, I had to reframe entire articles in a handful of short sentences. In this phase, the introduction became the playground where I’d force myself to practice writing without adding any links at all.

Links are powerful. Arguably adding links between different sites is the foundation of the world wide web. But for the next week, try to start writing without linking. Whether it is an email, blog post or tweet, try to communicate what’s brewing inside you without any shortcuts. It is surprisingly difficult and refreshing at the same time.

Internet Black Hole

The Markup
”Big tech is watching you. We’re watching big tech.” That’s the tagline of online publisher The Markup that officially launched last week following almost two years of development, including a couple of leadership hiccups along the way. Their homepage is refreshingly simple, emphasizing donations and tips from readers instead of digital advertising. I loved reading about their decision to encourage republishing of articles through creative common license and their effort to avoid email tracking. Big welcome to the Internet.

Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash
This is a very ambitious post that links the current tech backlash to a more fundamental scepticism of the postmodern notion of innovation. While I find the post too complex, it does run parallel with some of my own thinking around the diminish of the collective. Our on-demand culture of everything from TV-series, transportation, and food delivery, does seem to fit a trend where our individualized convenience trumps what’s better for the society at large. If so, maybe we should, as Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison suggested last year, start to think about progress again.

MSCHF Box
Buy the box above for $100 USD, wait 100 days, without opening the box, and you can sell it back to the company for $1,000 USD. Yes, you read that right. You can of course also decide to open the box that contains an unknown item worth anywhere between $0-7,000 USD. The main challenge seems to be getting your hand on the box that sells out within seconds of being released due to shopping bots. So your best chance is likely watching Unbox Therapy open two boxes. I find it extremely clever, applying similar mechanics as Mr. Beast is using to grow his YouTube channel with unprecedented speed.

Printing Money ft TikTok
Following the past weeks’ newsletters, I find it appropriate to share this really good visual representation of a million versus a billion dollars. Power, not money.

Roadside Flower

Visualization of Heights
Turn any part of the world into a Joy Division album cover with this simple tool that automatically draws peaks on any part of the world. Thanks to Emily for making me aware of it.

Understory

Ryan Broderick - Garbage Day
When people ask me who is best at Internet culture my answer is Ryan Broderick. Ryan is a reporter at Buzzfeed and once a week he dumps the Internet into your inbox in his newsletter, Garbage Day. It is through Ryan I come across places like /r/BreadStapledToTrees, Hydroman’s TikTok, and Shitty Food Blog.

Book Club

Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
A widow, her son, a sailor, Spring, and Fall. That is the rather simple setup of this beautifully written novel by Yukio Mishima. It is the first book I’ve read by Yukio, but I’ll make sure to pick up more in the coming months. We shouldn’t forget the essential stories in our obsession about the latest TikToks.

Readers’ Corner

Jesper replied to last week’s IRL Idiots with the extremely fitting cartoon below. Made by him.

And then I also got to catch up on yet another thoughtful reply by Dries who grabbed a loose thread in Understory to comment on his own use of closed groups on the Internet. I hope Dries turns the thoughts into a proper blogpost. We need a richer understanding of what we talk about when we talk about the internet.

Topical Groups
These tend to replace "the forum", where in the late 90's people would set up a phpBB they now set up a slack or discord group. For instance the UX Antwerp group uses this to "force build" community. A more organic example is the mechanical keyboard communities linked to for example mykeyboard.eu. These are type of group that I check occasionally, but actually have all notifications switched off.

Organisational Groups
These are used as a behind the scenes for organising actual things (events/publications/...). In my case this is thingscon.org and fri3dcamp.be which use slack, and these I find most useful or relevant. We have face to face meetings every month or three months, and use slack to synchronise on progress. In that case it truly replaces email in a much more direct contact.

Friend Groups
These are much smaller, I think I'm only really part of one (discord) group which we mainly use for voice chatting during a weekly gaming night. Occasionally sharing some links, but that tends to be minimal ... in that case chatting happens in another Signal group (for which I'm still really please that I managed to persuade the whole group to move to Signal ;-) So in this last case slack/discord is used to enhance social contact during a 'live' activity, in our case gaming.

Naive Weekly

Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.

Last week this newsletter was sent to 299 subscribers. Twelve people are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write this newsletter: Nikolaj, Antal, Søren, Dries, Mikkel, Tina, Aydo, Lukas, Hans, Csongor, Ida Marie & Angela!

Photograph by Ana Santl.

<3

Kristoffer